Carnival Corporation & plc, the world’s largest cruise shipping group, plans to simulator train 7,000 officers in 2016, almost three times as many as last year, a senior company executive said.

“We have established in a programme now to build a Carnival Corporation global training centre in Almere, at least I think it's going to be in Almere. We've selected a site for doing it. We're going to build our own facility and it's scheduled for completion in 2016. We need to ramp up the training as the fleet gets larger, we add more ships to the fleet, as I'll mention later,” said  Howard S. Frank, said Vice Chairman, Chief Operating Officer and Member of Executive Committee of the world’s largest cruise shipping group.

“We'll have many, many more officers and crew to train. So we'll move from 2,700 officers being trained this year to up to 7,000 officers in this facility by 2016. So we are very serious about the training of our officers, both deck and engine officers. And we'll have five bridge stimulators and four engine room simulators. And then it will also use that as a educational and training facility for shoreside and shipboard staff throughout the corporation and we will expand it as we grow this. But it's a very large footprint that we've outlined and it's going to be a world-class center of excellence for operating of cruise ships,” he said at the shareholders’ meeting of the company in London last week.